How memberships work

A membership in Walletap is an ordinary wallet pass that carries an end date, and sometimes a number of visits. Everything else — plans, the webshop, renewals, freezes, the door — exists to set that date or to check it.

The pieces#

The template is a Generic template, the type the dashboard describes as membership and ID cards. It decides what the card looks like. Northside Fitness uses one called Northside Membership.

Plans belong to the template. A plan says how long a membership lasts, how many visits it allows and what it costs — for example a monthly membership, a 10-visit card, or a staff pass. See membership plans.

The pass is what a member holds. When a plan is applied to it, the pass gets the plan's name, its end date and, for visit-based plans, a visit counter. Those values live on the pass, so later changes to a plan do not rewrite memberships already sold.

How a membership starts#

There are three ways, and they all produce the same kind of pass:

• At the desk. Staff add the member in the desktop or mobile app and choose a plan. See add members in the app.
• Online. The member buys a plan in your webshop and pays by card. The pass is created when the payment succeeds.
• Through the API. Your own system issues the pass. See passes over the API.

How the dates move#

A renewal gives the same pass a new end date — at the desk, in the webshop, or automatically when a recurring plan is charged again. A freeze pauses the membership for a number of days and adds those days to the end date. Neither issues a new pass, so the member keeps the card already in their wallet. See renewals and freezes.

A membership's end date is shown on the card through a custom "valid until" field. It is not the wallet's own expiry date, which would move the card to the wallet's expired passes and make a renewed member hunt for it. The renewals page explains how to set the field up.

What a scan checks#

Every scanner — the desktop app at the desk, the mobile app, and a door reader — asks the same questions of a membership pass:

1. Was it invalidated by hand, or by a cancelled subscription?
2. Is it frozen? A frozen pass has a start date in the future.
3. Has its end date passed?
4. Has a visit-based membership used all its visits?

Passes made with an Employees plan skip the date and visit checks: they never expire, and a door lets them in outside opening hours too. The app scanner also applies a plan's daily entrance limit. What a refused scan looks like is covered in scanning a pass and door access.

Where the money goes#

Payments belong to companies, not to the account. Each location is assigned to a company, each company connects its own Stripe account, and a sale at a location is paid into the account of that location's company. A plan therefore needs a Stripe price on every company that sells it — the plans page shows where that is set. See companies and Stripe.

Where fiscalisation is set up for a company, a webshop sale also produces a fiscalised invoice, emailed to the buyer.

Where the work happens#

Memberships are run from the desktop app at the front desk: plans, renewals, freezes, scanning with a USB reader, payments and receipts. The mobile app renews, freezes and scans with the camera. The browser dashboard is where you design the card, set up the webshop and connect payments. See which app do I need.

Next steps#